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OLD 
NORTHAMPTON 



BY 



CHARLES DOWNER HAZEN, Ph.D. 
Professor of History in Smith College 



AN ADDRESS 

Delivered before the Faculty and Students of Smith College, 

June /, /po^, on the occasion of the Two Hundred 

and Fiftieth Anniversary of the 

Founding of Northampton 



CAMBRIDGE 

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

1904 



F74- 



'Sooyrteht Em™ 

it*-* »'%*•( 

CLASS <^XXo. No. 

/&3PY B 



Copyright, IQ04 
By Charles Downer Hazen 



OLD 
NORTHAMPTON 



TN sixteen hundred and fifty-four Louis 
A the Fourteenth, called the Great, was 
king of France and of Navarre. The 
splendors of Versailles had not yet broken 
upon the astonished world, but the king 
was already the focal point of the interest of 
Europe in war, in diplomacy, and in man- 
ners. He was also an American monarch 
ruling over an indefinite and growing forest 
kingdom. French explorers were heroically 
plunging into American woods, and travers- 
ing American waters, purposing the greater 
glory of their brilliant king. Yet in that 
year Lake Ontario and Lake Erie were but 
faintly known, and the Ohio River had not 
yet been discovered. A quarter of a century 
must still elapse before La Salle should make 
his wonderful voyage down the Mississippi, 
proving at least that not that way lay the 



Old Northampton 



road to coveted Cathay, and still another 
quarter of a century must go by before New 
Orleans should be founded. 

In sixteen hundred and fifty-four Germany 
was just beginning to recover from the 
frightful ravages of the Thirty Years' War, 
in which she had lost a third of her popula- 
tion and had suffered indescribable woe. 

In sixteen hundred and fifty-four the Great 
Elector was struggling, by craft and energy, 
by a scrupulous indifference to scruples, to 
weld the poor and scattered fragments of 
Prussia into a state that should command 
respect, and was largely succeeding. His 
capital, Berlin, was an inconsiderable village 
of six thousand inhabitants. 

In sixteen hundred and fifty-four Queen 
Christina, the brilliant and erratic daughter 
of Gustavus Adolphus, abdicated her throne 
of Sweden and entered upon that strange 
life of retirement which furnished amazement 
and entertainment to Europe for many years 
to come. 

In sixteen hundred and fifty-four Oliver 
Cromwell was Lord High Protector of Great 



Old Northampton 



Britain. Originally a Huntingdon farmer, 
he had risen with unexampled swiftness and 
by sheer force of will and insight to a position 
of unquestioned primacy among English- 
speaking men. He moved grandly through 
the most tortuous and tumultuous period of 
English history, audacious, adroit, masterful 
"in the world of action," says the most 
judicial of English historians, "what Shake- 
speare was in the world of thought, the 
greatest because the most typical English- 
man of all times." 

While this most typical Englishman of 
history was endeavoring to govern a turbulent 
state in a sea of trouble, other Englishmen, 
sharing his beliefs and ambitions, were en- 
gaged upon a work to be rated no less high 
in the long result of time. Cromwell himself 
is said to have been at one time on the point 
of leaving England for America forever. 
He came not, but others came, and the great 
dispersion of the English race began, — the 
most momentous fact in modern history. 

Our national motto has ever been, "Go 
West, go West, go further West," a motto 



Old Northampton 



nearly as old as the settlement of this country. 
The colonists were fully conscious of this 
impulse in their blood. Hardly had the few 
settlements been founded on the eastern 
shore than the enterprising adventurers took 
the Indian trails, and as early as 1633 the 
fame of the Connecticut River — the long, 
fresh, rich river, as these pioneers called it — 
began to be bruited along Massachusetts 
Bay. , Whole bodies of men or churches 
moved over a hundred miles westward into 
the wilderness. New Haven on the Sound, 
Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor were 
established by people from eastern towns; 
finally Springfield, in 1636, the sole frontier 
post of Massachusetts in the west. The 
colonization of this valley was thus perhaps 
the earliest illustration in our history of the 
potent western fever. Religious differences 
were involved in the settlement of some of 
these earlier towns, though the economic 
motive was always present. The latter, how- 
ever, was the sole cause of the settlement 
of Northampton. Men came first to these 
meadows for the simple reason that they 



Old Northampton 



believed they could make a better living here 
than where they were : which is the very 
reason why men have gone to Ohio, Illinois, 
and the Pacific slope. We may call the 
founding of this town a typically American 
act, in a sense in which the founding of 
Massachusetts Bay, of Rhode Island and 
New Hampshire, was not, for in those cases 
motives were in play which have had only a 
slight role in our history. The plan for the 
settlement originated in Hartford, and it was 
at first chiefly Hartford men who came here. 
There were with them a few from the other 
river towns to the south. These people 
bought the land from the Indians for one 
hundred fathoms of wampum and ten coats. 
A hundred fathoms of wampum were prob- 
ably worth a hundred and twenty-five dollars. 
There is no documentary proof of the 
route by which the founders of this town 
made their entrance here, but the probability 
is that they came by the course which after- 
ward became the travelled way to the towns 
to the south. This roadway entered the 
town very nearly where West Street is now 



Old Northampton 



located. The crossing at Mill River was at 
or near the site of the present bridge, though 
very many years were to pass before there 
were bridges anywhere. In what way their 
household goods were conveyed hither, 
whether on horseback or in ox-carts, is not 
known. On what day they arrived, how 
many there were in the first company of 
settlers, and where they choose their home 
lots, are all matters of conjecture. Un- 
questionably some of them came in 1654. 
Two years later there were about twenty- 
five families here. 

The first home lots, usually consisting of 
four acres, were allotted on what are now 
King and Pleasant, Market and Hawley, 
Bridge and Main streets. These designa- 
tions, needless to say, did not come into use 
for a long while, — indeed, until the nine- 
teenth century. 

The feeling of isolation, the bitter home- 
lessness, the sense of separation from all that 
had thus far been accomplished in this world 
for the greater profit and dignity of men, 
society, institutions, arts, letters, comforts, the 



Old Northampto7i 



influences that elevate and soften and endear 
life, these must have been the dominant 
sensations with the founders of North- 
ampton, struggle with however much Puri- 
tan stoicism they might summon up to 
keep the emotion in check. They were on 
the lonely and exposed border, — a small, 
obscure, poor, and uneducated group of men. 
In 1654 there were probably not seventy-five 
thousand Englishmen in the New World, and 
these were widely scattered. A long, thin 
line of settlements, fringing the wild shores 
of the Atlantic from Maine to New York, 
and some settlements in Maryland and Vir- 
ginia — that was all. New York, the Jerseys, 
were under the Dutch and Swedes. William 
Penn had not yet received the charter which 
he coveted. Neither Philadelphia nor Balti- 
more had yet been founded. The Carolinas 
and Georgia had as yet no charters and no 
settlers. A feeble Spanish colony was cling- 
ing amid southern fevers to an uncertain life 
at St. Augustine. As these founders of our 
town unpacked their few goods that night 
of their arrival here, the sense of their utter 



8 Old Northampton 

loneliness must have been crushing indeed. 
To the east of them, unbroken solitude for 
sixty miles or more. Lancaster, northeast of 
Worcester, was the nearest settlement in that 
direction, and that was far from the rest of 
the settlements, which were close upon the 
Bay, and Lancaster had only been founded 
the year before. Along the line traversed in 
the main by the Boston and Albany Railroad 
there was no settlement between Cambridge 
and Springfield. Worcester was not yet. 
Indeed, for forty years after the settlement 
of Northampton a great part of the county 
of Worcester was a wilderness. To the 
south, Springfield was the nearest village, and 
the only one in Massachusetts. To the west 
Albany was the nearest, and to the north 
there was no sign of civilization until the 
shores of the St. Lawrence were reached 
and the fleur-de-lis was seen floating upon 
its white background from the Plains of 
Abraham. 

Every step in the process of settlement 
that has carried us to the Pacific has been, 
of course, simply an advance to a new 



Old Northampton 



frontier. The founders of Northampton 
were true frontiersmen in their day. Cour- 
age they had, "steadfastness in the bold 
design." There was no thought of drawing 
back, but poverty of every sort, of things 
material, intellectual, and social, was the 
chief characteristic of their lives. The only 
poverty they did not know was that of 
opportunity. 

It takes an effort of the imagination to 
picture the life of this town two centuries 
ago. There were no roads, no bridges, no 
mails, no newspapers to keep up the connec- 
tion with the human race. A kind of cart- 
way was early established to Springfield, but 
toward Boston or Albany, or the north, no 
cart could travel for many years. Our town 
representatives went to the legislature on 
horseback by the old Bay Path, merely a 
bridle-path through the woods. The Indians 
had the custom of burning the woods each 
year, which kept them free from undergrowth 
and made them penetrable in every direction 
on foot or horse ; but that was all. 

As late as 1799 there were only seven 



io Old Northampton 

post-offices in the Commonwealth of Massa- 
chusetts. It was in 1792 that Northampton 
was first made a postal centre, under the 
administration of Washington. Previous to 
that time the nearest one was Springfield, 
and every one who had occasion to visit that 
town was expected to bring whatever mail- 
matter there might be which was destined 
for Northampton or the neighboring towns. 
No regular means of conveyance up and 
down the valley then existed, and very little 
correspondence was carried on by persons 
living in the interior towns. Only an occa- 
sional traveller or an itinerant tradesman 
brought news of the outside world. 

The first regular stage line was not estab- 
lished until 1792, when the town was already 
one hundred and forty years old, and this 
went only once a week from Springfield to 
Hanover, New Hampshire. On Tuesday 
one might start north, on Thursday one 
might start south. There were no news- 
papers to increase the gaiety of the town 
during all this period, for though " The 
Hampshire Gazette " is older than " The 



Old Northampton 1 1 

London Times," it was not founded until 
1786. Surely the people of Northampton 
were in a position to appreciate the bless- 
ings of solitude. 

Yet here and under such conditions there 
was planted what, after two hundred and fifty 
years, Baedeker, the objective, passionless, 
disillusioned observer of the modern world, 
recognizes as " a lovely, elm-shaded city, the 
frontispiece of the book of beauty which 
Nature opens wide in the Connecticut 
Valley." Much must have been accom- 
plished during that time. 

"The gist of the matter is, not where a 
man starts from, but where he comes out," 
says Lowell; and this is as true of a town 
as of an individual. The men who founded 
Northampton were manual laborers prepared 
to wrest their fortune from the soil. No 
profession was represented in that little band 
that found its way from Hartford hither two 
hundred and fifty years ago. 

For seventy-five years no physician was to 
reside here, and lawyers everywhere through- 
out the colonies were largely a product of the 



12 Old Northampton 

eighteenth century. But no sooner was the 
necessary work of axe and hammer and saw 
fairly under way than these Englishmen — 
for most of them had been born in England 
— sought to enrich and deepen the local life. 
And thus the minister and the schoolmaster 
were added to the town. 

John Cotton, the Boston divine, used to 
say that he loved to sweeten his mouth with 
a piece of Calvin before he went to sleep. 
The taste for this heroic confection was wide- 
spread at this time, and was fully shared by 
the founders of this town. Their leading 
intellectual interest for many decades was 
religion. Though only worldly considera- 
tions led to the settlement of Northampton, 
the men who came were most devout. The 
first public building erected here was ordered 
shortly after their arrival, and was the meet- 
ing-house. It was twenty-six feet long, 
eighteen feet wide, and nine feet high. 
Though small, it was better than the houses 
that sheltered the people, for it was of sawn 
timber, while theirs were of logs. This build- 
ing stood at the corner of the present Court- 



Old Northampton 13 

House yard, probably jutting out into King 
Street. It had two windows, a chimney, 
probably no pulpit nor any other feature 
peculiar to houses of worship. The roof was 
made of thatch ; for the meadows furnished 
excellent reed grass, which these men, born 
and bred in England, knew how to weave 
into a roof that should protect from rain. X 
There were no pews, but only benches with- 
out backs. Yet in this mean and lowly struc- 
ture the intellectual and spiritual life of the 
town began. This was the second meeting- 
house built west of Lancaster, the first 
having been erected in Springfield a few 
years before. This building was used for 
town meetings ; also for elections. To this 
day in republican Switzerland the church is 
frequently used as the polling place. It is 
felt that the place where men worship God 
is not desecrated by service to the State. At 
the table where the minister sat on Sunday 
or on lecture day sat at other times the 
moderator of the town. Worshippers were 
not summoned to church by a bell, for for 
thirty years there was no bell. A drummer 



14 Old Northampton 

went through the streets or a trumpet was 
sounded from meeting-house hill. 

The origin of the New England town is an 
open question, but one thing is sure, — that 
the men who first settled here were not past 
masters in the art of government. The 
records of the town show order and system 
only slowly emerging from confusion and un- 
certainty. By homely methods, by the steady 
application of common sense, the fabric of a 
vigorous and intelligent political life was 
built up. These men brought with them 
no finished institutions. Experimentation 
was the order of the day. Town meetings 
were held six or ten or twelve times a year ; 
for the town had much to do. All land lots 
were assigned by vote of the citizens in 
town meeting, and for some time no one 
might sell his land without the consent of 
the town. Legislation had to be enacted 
against hogs, bears, wolves, crows, and dogs, 
as those denizens of earth and air gave 
trouble. In town meeting was chosen the 
minister, and there his salary was determined. 
In town meeting were elected commissioners 



Old Northampton 15 

to end small causes. It was the town that 
voted that a boat be built at common expense 
to serve as a ferry at Hockanum. 

People from outside were not permitted to 
come here and settle without the consent of 
the citizens in town meeting, for one of the 
keenest interests of every New England town 
was to keep the social body free from con- 
tamination. 

As the problems of local politics arose 
they were settled by common-sense methods. 
Town offices were shunned, and many per- 
sons elected declined to serve. Consequently 
a law was passed by which all who were 
chosen to office must serve or pay a fine of 
twenty shillings. As town meetings were 
held frequently, there were many absentees. 
Straightway a system of fines was voted. 
Any absentee must pay a fine of twelve- 
pence, and if absent from the meeting which 
chose the selectmen, he must pay two 
shillings sixpence " unless the delinquent 
can give some just cause and the Towne so 
judge of it." If any man should leave the 
meeting before it was over and without 



1 6 Old Northampton 

permission from the moderator he should 
pay twelvepence. These meetings were not 
yet clothed in the dignity of the Roman 
Senate. They were so disorderly that it 
was necessary to provide that there should 
be not more than one speaker at a time, upon 
a penalty of twelvepence for every offence. 
The prevalent tumultuous manner of con- 
ducting business was pronounced "dishon- 
orable to God and grievous to many persons." 
Finally the custom of calling the roll at town 
meeting and fining those not present was 
adopted in 1690. In these ways the town 
attempted to force the cooperation of all in 
the civic life. 

The first school was established ten years 
after the arrival of the settlers, when Mr. 
James Cornish was chosen first schoolmaster. 
It is interesting to know that the town, em- 
barking upon its distinguished educational 
career, voted this protagonist of culture the 
princely salary of ^thirty dollars a year. He 
was to " take the benefit," that is, to receive 
tuition from the scholars too. The fact that 
he stayed here only two or three years may be 



Old Northampton 17 

merely a coincidence. In 1687 the salary 
was fixed at two hundred dollars, and the 
system of scholars' fees abolished. 

At the same time was established the first 
grammar school which could prepare for 
college. It is probable that Timothy Ed- 
wards, father of Jonathan Edwards, was for 
some time a teacher in this school. Thus, 
before the first half-century was over North- 
ampton had a school organization adequate 
to the times. 

The first schools in New England were 
not free. Here, as elsewhere, pupils paid 
tuition. Neither were they co-educational. 
It was not until 1792, nearly one hundred 
and forty years after the founding of the 
town, that girls were for the first time ad- 
mitted to the public schools. This revolu- 
tionary change to co-education brought with 
it another — the employment of women as 
teachers as well as men, hitherto the only 
ones. 

Thus by the close of the seventeenth cen- 
tury the institutional life of the town was 
well established. The rude forefathers of 



1 8 Old Northampton 

the hamlet had planted firmly church and 
state and school. 

Laborious, sensible, ambitious, the town 
produced in the eighteenth century a number 
of leaders, altogether disproportionate to its 
size, for the population in 1675 was perhaps 
five hundred, in 1775 certainly less than two 
thousand. Yet the fame of it had gone far 
and wide throughout the colonies. 

As far as I can see into the dim and in- 
complete records of the past of this town the 
one person whose influence was most pro- 
found, most sympathetic, and most enduring 
upon the local life was Solomon Stoddard, 
the second pastor of the church. Of Boston 
birth, he was graduated from Harvard at the 
age of nineteen, and was the first librarian of 
that college. He came here in 1670, sixteen 
years after the founding of the town, and here 
he lived and labored for nearly sixty years, 
dying at the age of eighty-six. 

It was the time when the town could take 
the impress of a strong and wise personality. 
" He grew up with it, moulded and shaped 
the religious education of two generations, 



Old Northampton 19 

and died, revered, honoured, and sincerely 
mourned." He was the one educated man in 
the community during much of that period. 
His was no local reputation. Timothy 
Dwight, a former President of Yale, says in 
his book of travels, which is one of the 
soundest sources of early New England 
history, "that he possessed, probably, more 
influence than any other clergyman in the 
province, during a period of thirty years." 
"His light and influence," said the Boston 
" Weekly News Letter," " went out through 
the whole country and gave a name and 
reputation to the town. He was "a wise 
& judiceous Casuist," says this paper in the 
quaint language of the day, " whose Advice 
& Council were much sought & valu'd by 
the perplex'd & scrupulous." He was a 
theological leader of renown, and Stoddar- 
deanism was a school of thought that took 
its name from him. 

For many years it was his custom to 
pay an annual visit to Boston. The people 
flocked in crowds to hear him preach, says 
a contemporary, and those who were unable 



20 Old Northampton 

to get into the church built stages around 
the walls, so that every window was filled 
with the listening multitude. 

Here labored for a quarter of a century 
Jonathan Edwards, laying deep the sure 
foundations of his thought. Two Americans 
of the eighteenth century won an interna- 
tional reputation as thinkers, — Benjamin 
Franklin and Jonathan Edwards, — two men 
as dissimilar as well could be ; the one an 
experimentalist and realist, the poet of com- 
mon sense, as the French critic Sainte-Beuve 
has called him; the other a theologian and 
metaphysician, a scholar and idealist. Jona- 
than Edwards is the only Northamptonian, 
as far as I am aware, who has penetrated that 
temple of fame, as fame reveals itself to the 
British mind, — the Encyclopaedia Britannica. 

Let no Northamptonian think the dis- 
missal of Edwards from his pulpit a blot 
upon the fame of this town. When Pro- 
fessor Allen, his latest and his admiring bi- 
ographer, says that the dismissal of Edwards 
was indeed the salvation of the church in 
Northampton, and that the people of North- 



Old Northampton 21 

ampton had the highest interests of them- 
selves and their children at stake in their 
contest with their pastor, we are justified in 
refusing to apologize for the action of the 
town, save for the manner of it — not for the 
central fact. 

But leaving all this aside, the life of this 
town was enriched forever by the influence 
of that personality. I know of no better 
description of Edwards' life in Northampton 
than that given by Dr. Rose. " The reader of 
the scanty records of his life here receives," 
says he, "the impression of something mys- 
terious, indistinct, elusive. It was a lofty 
and rapt existence, apart, unearthly. ... It 
was a life of amazing industry, but all its 
interests were intellectual and professional. 
It was the life of a scholar, — meditative, 
solitary in a manner, self-centred, without 
many books, ascetic, remote, untravelled, 
mystical. His two companions were the in- 
tuition and the spirit. What can one make 
of a life like that, with its twelve or thirteen 
hours a day of intense study, its heavenly 
preoccupations and profound reveries ? " 



22 Old Northampton 

One is reminded by this career of Emerson's 
stirring paean to the scholar's life : " Neither 
years nor books have yet availed to extirpate 
a prejudice rooted in me, that a scholar is 
the favorite of Heaven and Earth, the ex- 
cellency of his country, the happiest of men. 
His duties lead him directly into the holy 
ground where other men's aspirations only 
point. His successes are occasions of the 
purest joy to all men. Eyes is he to the blind ; 
feet is he to the'lame. His failures, if he is 
worthy, are inlets to higher advantages." 

Here lived Joseph Hawley, lawyer and 
leader of men. In those critical years that 
succeeded the passage of the Stamp Act, 
every action of the English government was 
canvassed and scrutinized. The matter was 
delicate and dangerous. A discussion, able 
and thorough, lasted ten years before the 
colonists reached the decision to withdraw 
from the British Empire. In this intellectual 
contest, which preceded the military contest, 
and without which the latter never could 
have been, Hawley was a power. In the 
Legislature, in the Provincial Congresses, 



Old Northampton 23 

his utterance was clear and bold and weighty. 
He was the leading public man of western 
Massachusetts. 

Some of the great phrases of the Revolu- 
tion, which carried nerve and flame to many 
a soldier and civilian in those days of stress, 
were his. The first time that the phrase 
"The Parliament of Great Britain has no 
right to legislate for us " was ever publicly 
uttered in these colonies, was when it fell 
from the lips of Hawley, in the State House 
in Boston. 

Years later, in 1774, when every other 
leader was refusing to admit that war was 
the only way out of our difficulty with Great 
Britain, but was insisting that in concilia- 
tion lay the panacea, he sent this blunt and 
prophetic assertion: "Fight we must finally, 
unless Britain retreats. Our salvation de- 
pends upon a persevering union. Every 
grievance of any one colony must be held as 
a grievance to the whole, and some plan be 
settled for a continuation of Congresses, even 
though Congresses will soon be declared by 
Parliament to be high treason." 



24 Old Northampton 

It was of Hawley that this story is told: 
During the Revolution he was deeply de- 
spondent about the issue. Caleb Strong, 
returning from the legislature, talked with 
him and heard him say, " We shall both be 
hung." " No, Major Hawley," said Strong, 
"probably not more than forty will be hung 
— we shall escape." "Sir," said Hawley, 
aroused, " I would have you understand that 
I shall be one of the first three to hang." 

Here lived Seth Pomeroy, most human 
and attractive of them all, untutored leader 
of men, straightforward, spontaneous, with 
grit and fight in every drop of blood that 
coursed through his active veins, blacksmith, 
gunsmith, famous warrior against the Indians 
and the French, major in the expedition 
against Louisburg, member of Provincial 
Congresses, his very presence anywhere worth 
a battalion of soldiers, known throughout the 
colony, a tower of strength. 

At the very beginning of the trouble with 
Great Britain it was truly said of him that he 
was "very high in liberty." Stirring indeed 
is what we know of his story. Worn out 



Old Northampton 25 

with the toil of the Second Provincial Con- 
gress and with his military duties, — he was 
then sixty-nine years old, — about the middle 
of June, 1775, he came back to Northampton 
for a period of rest. Only twenty-four hours 
elapsed after reaching Northampton when a 
messenger arrived from General Putnam 
announcing the contemplated movement 
of the British upon Charlestown Heights. 
" Aware that this would be the signal for 
hostilities," says a recent English historian, 
"he took his horse from the team and was 
quickly on his way to Boston. Twice chang- 
ing horses on the route, all through the hours 
of the night he urged his onward way, and at 
noon on the day of the battle of Bunker's Hill 
he reached Cambridge. There he borrowed 
a mount from the Commander-in-Chief, but 
the cannon fire that raked Charlestown Neck 
was so hot that he did not conceive himself 
justified in risking an animal not his own 
property. His person, however, belonged to 
himself: so he walked across the Isthmus and 
up to the rail fence, where he was received 
with cheers and provided with a musket." 



26 Old Northampton 

Toward the close of the day, continues 
this writer, "the brow of Bunker's Hill was 
a place of great slaughter. It was there that 
Putnam, in language that came perilously 
near a breach of the rule against swearing in 
the Military Regulations of Massachusetts, 
adjured the colonists to make a stand and 
give them one shot more. Pomeroy, with- 
out a sword, but with a broken musket in 
his hand which did as well, took upon him- 
self to see that his younger countrymen 
marched steadily past the point of danger. 
Warren never left the redoubt, for he fell 
where he had fought, and he was buried where 
he had fallen : a bright figure, passing out of 
an early chapter of the great story as un- 
expectedly and irrevocably as Mercutio from 
the play. Pomeroy lamented that on a day 
when Warren — ardent, hopeful, and elo- 
quent — had fallen, he himself, 'old and use- 
less/ escaped unhurt. He had not long to 
wait. Having resigned his post of Brigadier- 
General, for which he no longer felt himself 
fit, Pomeroy became a regimental officer, 
and, with his seventy years upon him, went 



Old Northampton 27 

campaigning in the Jerseys. A course of 
bivouacs brought him a pleurisy, and he died 
for America just as certainly as if, like his 
young friend, he had been shot through the 
head at Bunker's Hill." 

The most conspicuous and notable public 
life that stands upon Northampton's roll of 
honor is that of Caleb Strong. A direct 
descendant of Elder John Strong, one of the 
most prominent figures in the settlement of 
Northampton, a graduate of Harvard College, 
a lawyer of high standing, Caleb Strong was 
the recipient of a remarkable degree of pub- 
lic confidence and honor. Eleven years he 
was Governor, of this Commonwealth, a longer 
period than that allotted to any other gov- 
ernor in the history of the State, save to John 
Hancock, to whom eleven terms were like- 
wise given. 

When independence was declared and 
Massachusetts was obliged to give herself 
a constitution in place of the charter no 
longer adequate to her situation, Caleb 
Strong was one of the committee of four 
that drew up that instrument which remained 



28 Old Northampton 

for forty years the fundamental law of the 
State. The other three were John Adams, 
Samuel Adams, and James Bowdoin. For 
nine years he was State Senator, for seven 
he was United States Senator. The highest 
dignity he ever held was that of member of 
the Philadelphia Convention that framed the 
Constitution of the United States. In that 
plain brick building in Philadelphia already 
immortalized as the place from which the 
Declaration of Independence was published 
to the world, sat the member from North- 
ampton, with Washington, Hamilton, Frank- 
lin, Madison, Elbridge Gerry, Rufus King, 
Roger Sherman, Oliver Ellsworth, Robert 
Morris, Gouverneur Morris, James Wilson, 
Edmund Randolph, John Rutledge, the 
Pinckneys, and others, the fifty-five picked 
men whom this country had chosen to save 
it from its dire distress. 

Lord Chatham praised the Continental 
Congress as an assembly of wise men be- 
yond Greek or Roman fame. The Con- 
stitutional Convention was far wiser and 
remains the most august assembly that this 



Old Northampton 29 

continent has ever seen. Nor was Strong 
an unimportant member of it. The records 
show his frequent participation in debate. 
Indeed, it seems that save for him no con- 
stitution would have been framed, the Con- 
vention would have been broken up, and the 
distress of this troubled country would have 
become deeper and more hopeless. The 
situation, briefly stated, was this : The Con- 
vention met in the middle of May. The 
middle of July came and nothing had been 
accomplished, save the engendering of bitter- 
ness. The large states were pitted against 
the small. The former wished population 
to be the standard in every branch of gov- 
ernment ; the latter wished equality of states 
in every branch, that thus they might be 
safe against the possible aggressions of the 
great. The difference was clean-cut, funda- 
mental, and vital. Finally Connecticut sug- 
gested the well-known compromise of state 
equality in the Senate and inequality accord- 
ing to population in the House. But it 
seemed impossible to get a majority for 
the compromise. It was seen that five 



30 Old Northampton 

states would favor and that probably five 
would oppose ; that thus there would be no 
decision. 

Massachusetts was a large state. Her in- 
terests were with Pennsylvania, Virginia, 
South Carolina, and Georgia, and she had 
constantly been voting with the large states. 
Now Elbridge Gerry of Boston, and Caleb 
Strong of Northampton, decided that the 
interests of the nation were paramount to 
those of the large states. They voted against 
their two colleagues, King and Gorham. The 
vote of Massachusetts, thus divided, was lost, 
and the Connecticut compromise was adopted 
by a vote of five states to four, for the voting 
was by states. Elbridge Gerry and Caleb 
Strong thus directly brought to a happy issue 
the most vexed and threatening question that 
the Convention ever had to settle. 

It is pleasant to reflect that the wisdom, the 
conciliatory spirit of a Northamptonian, was 
a national benefaction in the most critical 
moment this country had ever experienced 
up to that time. 

It is an ungracious task to sketch only 



Old Northampton 31 

three or four of the notable lives that have 
had Northampton for their stage, to the 
exclusion of the many, many others that 
have contributed to the rich inheritance of 
the town. Northampton has sent more men 
to the United States Senate than any other 
town in Massachusetts save Boston. In 
scholarship, in literature, in war, in philan- 
thropy, in public spirit, Northampton has 
achieved a large measure of distinction. 

In local history, which must forever con- 
stitute the true, authentic source of legitimate 
local pride, the work of Judd and Trumbull 
will remain a monument of patient and 
critical research. 

Not only have great men lived here, but 
interesting occurrences have added a lustre 
to the annals of the town. Here Bancroft 
conceived the idea of writing the history of 
the United States while yet he was a teacher 
on Round Hill. Here Motley, the historian 
of the Dutch Republic, studied as a lad. 
Here Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate 
vied with each other in legal debate, — a 
contest of Olympians. Here Ralph Waldo 



32 Old Northampton 

Emerson preached as a young man in the 
Unitarian Church, and here he later lectured. 
Here Henry Clay, at the height of his fame, 
spent a Sunday in 1833, attending the First 
Church in the morning and the Unitarian in 
the evening. Thus the Great Compromiser 
showed once more the ruling principle of his 
life, and thus the candidate for office revealed 
that large and wise tolerance of the politician 
for divergent schools of thought. Hither 
came Kossuth in 1852, the great Hungarian 
patriot and orator, Governor of the short- 
lived Republic of Hungary, and here he 
delivered one of those speeches which, by the 
beauty and swiftness of their diction and 
their eloquence, amazed the English-speaking 
world. 

The most interesting visitor of all was 
Lafayette, who came in 1825. Lafayette's 
final visit to the United States was in many 
ways remarkable. He had given so gener- 
ously of his youth and blood as to seem an 
American by adoption. Returning to France, 
he had played a conspicuous and a lofty role 
as a leader in the great revolution of that 



Old Northampton 33 

country. " The splendor of his later reputa- 
tion in the Old World heightened his repu- 
tation in the New. Now, after an absence 
of forty years, he returned a venerated hero 
of two great revolutions. A guest like this 
no nation was ever likely to entertain a 
second time. The heart of the whole Amer- 
ican people went out to him in salutation." 
It is interesting to remember that the Mar- 
quis de Lafayette has traversed the length 
of Elm Street, that he has stood upon Round 
Hill, that he has held a reception on Main 
Street, that he has been escorted to the Con- 
necticut River, as he resumed his way to 
Boston. 

It is a privilege to share the life of this 
renowned and ancient town. Its charm does 
not lie only or chiefly in its neighborhood, 
its stately river, its rich intervales, as the 
early writers called our meadows, in the 
mountains that stand like sentinels over it, 
but in the historic riches of its past, in the 
long and worthy record that has slowly 
unrolled here. The men who have lived 
here, and their deeds, are the precious treas- 
3 



34 Old Northampton 

ures of the community, and it is the part of 
wisdom to keep fresh and vivid memories so 
inspiriting. 

It was said of William the Silent that his 
character and life alone sufficed to keep the 
people of Holland firm and proud for a 
century and a half. Surely in the long and 
worthy annals of this town is to be found a 
similar potency. 

We pay instinctive reverence to the past. 
Yet the present and the past war not with 
each other. The present is but an instant 
caught upon the wing. Its whole tone and 
color and import flash forth only when seen 
upon the calm and spacious background of 
all that has gone before. The wondrous 
interplay of personality for two hundred and 
fifty years is what explains this town, this 
college, this day. But this is the very heart 
of mystery, the book of seven seals, the real 
and baffling essence of the matter, which 
none can analyze or portray, yet which all 
perhaps can feel. 



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